MANHATTAN CRUDE : in an age (and a war) consumed with Purity, the dying Dr Dawson's gift of crowd-sourced 'impure' natural penicillin was not just a global lifesaver. It was also a window into a new way of looking at the world.

Thursday, July 30, 2015

Lost beneath all the signal moral failures of WWII's top civilizations (Auschwitz et al) was the many technological failures thrown up by the top human civilizations.

On all sides, all through that six year long war, their citizens were promised ultra quick successes, due to their side's superior technology.

(The Maginot Line - the Bomber Always gets Through, the Six Week Blitzkrieg against the Russians, and on and on.)

Technological failure at the top, over and over.

At the bottom, there was the unexpected technological triumph of primitive microbe-made penicillin winning against diseases the best human synthetics (the Sulfas and the never to be synthetized penicillin) couldn't hope to cure.

Also at the bottom,the even more unexpected success of Henry Dawson, Dante Colitti, John l Smith and Larry Elder, who together forced the Allies to stop using penicillin as an exclusive weapon of war and made wartime penicillin-for-all instead into the one moral triumph of WWII....

I was raised on the multi-stage rocket form of Evolution--- you probably were too.

You all know the drill : the lowly bacteria climbed out of the primordial slime, evolved into slightly large microbes and then froze evolution-wise, preserved as in aspic, unchanged, for the next 3.5 billion years.

The microbes evolved into slightly larger amoebas and froze evolutionarily as well.

And so on and so on, ever so slowly up the evolutionary ladder of increasing size and complexity culminating in Civilized Man in the top capsule.

Leaving behind down below ,to float about forever like space junk, countless earlier stages of life.

But as Dr Martin Henry Dawson early demonstrated - the bacteria never actually stopped evolving and are evolving still.

They didn't evolved into something else and then hung about as living fossils - they continued to evolve, as all lifeforms do, 'in situ'.

Sometimes evolving into becoming more complex with bigger active genetic codes, sometimes dropping bits of their genetic code to become less complex ---- and more parasitic.

Rather like us, in fact.

For the ancestors of humans once used to make their own Vitamin C, like almost all other lifeforms still do - but then we dropped that ability - became less, not more complex - and now get our life-supporting Vitamin C by living off the avails of others.

His heresy was in focusing upon (and endlessly talking up) various discomforting forms of microbial evolution.

In 1940, microbes weren't supposed to evolve - I mean not after Day One.

Today we encounter all these forms of microbial evolution in our very first lectures in Microbiology 101 - they are essential learning.

Let's begin with all the wonderful lifesaving beta lactam antibiotics, starting of course with Dawson's natural penicillin. And how these amazing medicines work their non-toxic magic by breaking up molecules essential to other life forms but not to us humans.

But then how these antibiotic molecules, in turn, are liable to be broken up by other chemicals from the microbes under attack. And so it goes, on and on and back and forth.

How the bacteria and other microbes survive and flourish against all the best defence systems that the human body and human doctors can throw up against them.

Their sophisticated abilities in areas like Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT), quorum sensing and molecular mimicry, as 'lie low persisters', their various goo capsules, the daringly wall-less L-Form bacteria, their communal biofilms, all helping the microbe to survive inside us.

Then their dangerously effective chemicals like the flesh eating 'spreading factor' (hyaluronidase) that so helps them to flourish against us.

All subjects of scientific papers - often pioneering papers - from Dawson between 1925 and 1945 --- and still cutting edge science even today.

In 1940, the scientific consensus was that the 'essence' of all the microbes at the lower left of the ever upward arrow of progress was to be eternally stupid and weak ---- and to remain eternally unchanging.

Except that the primitive microbes were permitted to mark the very primitive beginnings of the long slow process of evolution ever upwards that ended in the brilliant changeability that is Civilized Man, at the upper right of the arrow of progress.

Dawson never denied that there were some things we humans do very well and the microbes do very badly.

He said only that that the converse was equally true : abilities and defects (physical and moral) were well and truly mixed throughout all the lifeforms, not exclusively separated into stupid and bad at the bottom and good and smart at the top.

Now exalting the concepts of mixing and mixtures is perhaps the most distinctive feature of the intellectual life of our present post-1945 age.

Whether you call it the post modern age or the post progress age, its all the same.

It is interesting to ask, therefore, what part did the popular journalism of wartime penicillin play in ending "The Progress Project" so abruptly in 1945 ?

Because try as the 1945 scientific/government/commercial elite might, they could never get the ordinary uneducated public (as opposed to say educated historians) to buy into the explanation that penicillin came from highly expensive, highly complicated, highly sophisticated chemical "deep tank" factories.

The popular journalism penicillin stories always seem to be what journalists call 'brites'.

You know : cute stories of dogs walking on back legs, cats smoking cigars and ordinary bread mold grown in ordinary bottles on ordinary kitchen tables saving lives when the most expensive drugs of the sophisticated corporate chemists couldn't.

I am not denying Auschwitz and the Atomic Bomb's hearty roles in the demise of "Progress".

But I have also come to believe that all these mass media "Ripley's Believe it or Not" flavoured tales of clever primitive microbes and stupid civilized chemists were as devastating, in their slow cumulative way, to The Progress Project as anything the then obscure Adorno and Horkheimer ever wrote ...

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

I suggest we replace the widely used term 'Post Modernity' with 'Post Progress' because it is both much more descriptive of what is actually going on and much more easily understood by the majority of the population who live outside academia.

I hope we all can at least agree on the second point : that far more people understand the term Era of Progress, 1875-1965 than do they the term Era of Modernity 1875-1965.

Now onto the first point.

All the many and varied postmodern -isms have at least one key element in common : they involve hitherto verboten mixing.

Be it of high and low (say in art) or normal and abnormal (say in sexual cum civil rights) or central/official/dominant or local/periphery/subculture (as in imperial/hegemony relationships).

I used high and low as my first example deliberately because the Era of Modernity was also the era of Social Darwin defined Progress.

Everything and everyone was slotted in one universal and eternal vertical hierarchy.

In/out, normal/abnormal etc were really just variants of the all important high/low distinction in worth.The elements of that ladder were never allowed to touch, let alone intermingle : for it was a heavily modified 'survival of the fittest' version of the old Great Chain of Being, only now leaning forward forty five degrees.

To the bottom left, were the oldest, smallest, weakest, stupidest beings destined - by 'the iron laws of nature', to quote a highly typical modernity cum progressive phrase - to be replaced by the newer, bigger, more complex and smarter beings at the top right - Civilized Man.

(Man as in, definitely not a woman.)

Any sort of mixing of any of the rungs of this vertical ladder or chain of 'worthiness to continued life' was definitely not allowed.

Instead, being half breeds, mixed breeds, sterile and defective hybrids, engaging in miscegenation, being of mixed bloods and 'passing' were Progress's most extreme crimes.

Now it is well known that most civilized people in the Era of Progress regarded the advanced civilization on Earth, when measuring both culture and technology, was Germany.

As is well known, the horrific postwar evidence coming out of Auschwitz immediately put paid to the exalted status of eighty million Germans as the most civilized and the most progressive nation on earth.

In a much slower fashion, it also put paid to the two billion of the rest of us in our easy lazy unexamined notions of exactly what was civilized and progressive behavior.

In 1945, we suddenly had the top of the Great Chain of Being being revealed as cold blooded mass murderers of humanity, something usually described as the behavior of life at the bottom.

Meanwhile, the bottom of the Great Chain had also become the mass lifesavers of humanity in the form of fungus made penicillin, something you would normally more expect from advanced German chemists at the top than from primitive penicillium slime at the very bottom.

1945 : Progress upended and mixed - the low high and the high low.

In a sense, it was a return to an earlier way of thinking, when it was assumed and accepted that good and bad intermingled in every being, in every society, in every time.

Added to this - a new feature - was a growing understanding that all lifeforms had to intermingle to keep the biosphere running smoothly - that global commensality was a fact, not a choice.

If Art today is a pastiche, so too is Life.

Life does not always imitate Art : sometimes Art, post 1945 Art as an clear example, rushes forth in catchup mode, trying to imitate Life ....

Monday, July 27, 2015

The era of Modernity and Progress was a deductive era, seeking the one and only absolutely correct and complete answer to every question ---- a great time to be a determinist, reductionist 'scientist'.

And thus a terribly bad era for historians, be they historians of nature (naturalists) or of humanity. Or indeed, if they are frontline medical clinicians like Dr Martin Henry Dawson, writing up a patient's history in a hospital setting.

Not a time then for them to be offering up an ever growing number of probable reasons possibly contributing to a given situation.

For Modernity and Progress hated diversity or plentitude, only hating probabilities and possibilities even worse : as Einstein opined, "(My) God does not play dice."

Einstein's era was a gassy Era (Zyklon B, if you have it, please), an era of "Terrible Simplicities", certainties, certitudes, normalcy.

Yet to the inductive natural historian (naturalist), out in the field, ever more possibilities and plentitude was their ticket to fame.

Oh to find a yet another tit mouse species (purple-colored even !) when the experts had claimed all tit mouses had been found and all were brown or gray !

Meanwhile the only philosopher type the majority of other philosophers recognized as truly being a philosopher, was sitting behind a desk in the lab.

Hard at work, trying to become famous in their branch of intellectual activity, trying to plenticide all this new plentitude as fast as it was being created.

Ignoring the warning of King Canute.

Seeking to reduce all of Reality down to a single paragraph long "Law of Everything".

Finally explaining the redheaded waitress's elliptic smile yesterday as being the result of the mechanical motion of a certain tiny sub atomic particle, in a distant part of the universe, eleven billion years earlier.

But historians are also fully philosophers : albeit philosophers who 'explain' but do not 'explain and predict specific actions'.

A natural historian will 'explain' why a very modern jet unexpectedly crashed in a lightning storm in a remote jungle airstrip by explaining that the weather is terrible hard to predict very accurately ----- even in big urban centres where expensive weather staff are plentiful, let alone in remote and poor parts of the world.

Most of us, still brainwashed from school, will argue that really is no explanation at all.

But the inductive historians' philosophy does fully explains Reality, as something simply being too vast and too complicated to ever be fully predictable for humanity.

They differ from the deductive philosophers only in not following up their explanations with specific predictions.

They thus fail to the test of being 'scientific' andphilosophers', at least in the self definition of those two as given by the lab-bound deducers.

But being economists in the way that few deductive scientists and philosophers are capable of being, the inducers hold fast to their view.

At least when set against the large amount of our limited waking hours and limited earthly resources (aka limited "money") we must devote to merely staying alive and warm.

By contrast, most our deductive philosophies still predict we will eventually make accurate and yet cheap predictions, if only we keep searching for the ultimate and absolute baseline truths that negate the need for all of today's topline expensive fact gathering and calculating.

(Translation of 'search' : you taxpayers continue to fund me doodling around in my lab.)

That Reality is ultimately 'knowable' in the sense of being predictable is not a fact though --- merely an opinion - and the opinion that predicting Reality is beyond our price range is another.

So we end up with a plentitude of opinions - and in the plenticidal era of Progress and Modernity, one had to be squashed - like a bug....

Saturday, July 25, 2015

There were to be no Fiddlers on no Roofs in the original Zionist paradise.

That is what I take away from David S Wyman and Rafael Medoff's book "A Race Against Death".

It is a collection of postwar interviews with key members of the still unknown Peter Bergson group (a medium sized organization run by Jews but including many Non-Jewish Americans) ---- and the only Jewish-run organization in North America who did anything effective to help, not hurt, the wartime Jews of Europe.

The reason you likely don't know any of this is because, the old adage to the contrary, until very recently the moral losers among North America's Jews wrote all the history books.

These moral losers were gradualist Zionists, Jews who believed that the solution to all the slights Jews got in the western European world and all the deadly pogroms that received in the eastern European world was a particular form of an sovereign Jewish nation in Palestine.

They did not believe in bold dramatic public actions to win Palestine by military force or by swaying world public opinion.

Instead as the Bergson Group's second in command, Samuel Merlin explains in the book, they thought a slow but steady stream of elite Jews --- young, fit, healthy, courageous, dedicated, entrepreneurial, socialist --- would gradually build up an economical vibrant Jewish community in British run but Arab majority populated Palestine and so control it in de facto fashion.

Chaim Weizmann, the head of the worldwide Zionists, told the British Peel commission in 1936 that he certainly didn't want six million Jews coming to Palestine all at once.

No, 'the old ones will pass, dust in a cruel world ---- only a branch will survive'.

This echoed Weizmann's earlier view of 1918 that if war forced all the miserable refugee Jews out of Eastern Europe and into Palestine,the Zion would be paradise will be swamped and the gradualist reformists could never set up a community worth having.

Eugenics , here code-named "selective immigration" by the socialist gradualist Zionists, was the key to understanding the minds of Weizmann and his American counterpart Samuel Wise and all of their generation born circa 1885.

They were well-off, westernized, secularized, Germany-oriented Jews.

The rural small town Jews of Eastern Europe, all those beards and Orthodox rituals, their determinedly backward ways, their poverty - they repulsed these gradualist Zionists, not as intensely as it did most Gentiles (let alone most anti-semites) but certainly a great deal.

Rescuing only 'the best' of them was always the gradualist Zionists' pre-war and wartimeaim.

Bergson and his crew were Zionists too, but willing to put that dream on the far far backburner when it became clear that Hitler was determined to kill all the Jews in Europe - starting with those backward East Europeans.

Bergson saw them all as individuals, as fellow humans, all worth saving, a concern to all humanity - Christian, agnostic and Jewish alike.

Bergson didn't want to rescue any of these Jews "to" (Zion or the West) he wanted to rescue them "from" Nazi death, leaving them to remain in situ in Eastern Europe.

He wanted the Allies to publicly warn the German public they'd mass gas bomb Germany if it didn't immediately stop mass gassing the Jews.

Berg pointedly asked why focus wartime Jewish efforts on a wonderful future postwar Zion when the Jews in the 1940s most interested in living there (the Jews of Eastern Europe) would all be dead ?

For me, Bergson's heroic motives and fevered actions were the actions of a man who grasped the full moral dimensions of all the pious western liberal democracy talk of "winning the war first".

Recall the western liberal democracies were - in the same breath - also refusing to put in a Second Front, at least not until the Nazis and Communists had warred each other to a pulp and the Nazis had solved the West's Eastern European Jewish Problem.

The mainstream Jewish organizations, led by Weizmann and Samuel Wise, bought into this scam - that was their number one sin.

But their number two sin was forgetting the millions dying overseas in their petty jealous anger over the (new) (poor) (small) foreign-led Bergson Group besting the moral worth of the rich big and well established American led Zionist organizations.

In all of this, Peter Bergson reminds me so much of Henry Dawson.

Dawson had never been involved in the researching the cure for invariably fatal SBE, the disease that made Rheumatic Fever the deadliest disease for school age kids in those days.

He had 'no skins in the game'.

But when he saw that penicillin had two unique attributes that made it likely to finally defeat SBE and suddenly leaped in with both feet, his early successes made the oldtimers in the SBE research field (Chester Keefer above all others) insanely jealous.

The response of Dr Keefer (the Samuel Wise of wartime penicillin) and others was to say that SBE was not a war priority and the penicillin for its patients would have to await the perfect world coming after the war was won first.

Knowing full well - just like Samuel Wise, FDR and Churchill had known about Europe's Jews - that the SBEs (like American Jew Charles Aronson) would be long dead before that wonderful day.

Jam Tomorrow for the dead Jews but never Jam Today for living Jews.

Bergson bucked them with all his might for three years - Dawson ditto for four years until he died worn out by his efforts.

Bergson lived a long filling life but the East European Jews died despite his all out efforts - Dawson died young but the SBEs lived thanks to his all out efforts.

I don't doubt Bergson would have readily exchanged his long life for Dawson's shorter life - if only he could see some of Dawson's success....

The far too well known form of the Holocaust (insert here stock images of Hungarian Jews being selected for the gas chamber at Auschwitz in late 1944) need never of happened and yet most of Europe's Jews would still have died.

The time to stop the second (open air public mass shootings late 1941, early 1942) and third Jewish Holocausts (secretive mass gassings 1942-1945) from ever occurring was in late 1939 and early 1940.

That is, before the successful conquest of France changed the war dynamics totally and at the moment when the mechanics of the initial Jewish Holocaust were first made public by the Nazis.As soon as the occupation of Poland began in the Fall of 1939 and the urban daily ration for each of its ethnic groups was publicly announced to the world, it was clear that all of Poland's three million Jews would fairly quickly die from the diseases caused by prolonged totally inadequate daily calorie intake.

Without a single Jew having to be directly shot, hung or gassed.

Call it a slow but steady 'Holocaust by Starvation'.

I am quoting, second hand, from official public documents of the League of Nations released around the world.

A League of Nations, which yes, in 1940, was still around and still active.

So no cant please from all the old people, claiming 'we didn't know' - you knew - and you still did nothing.

This is when Britain and France should have said they would immediately begin the aerial gassing of small German towns, unless the Nazis immediately stopped this mass murder by slow starvation.

In the beginning, the Nazis allotted the Jews a ration one fifth the size of the 2500 calories a day given to the country's Germans.

To set a baseline, 2500 calories is the minimum needed for hard working adults to survive long term in cool climates like Poland ---- if you also suffer inadequate domestic heating and very little cool weather clothing - which , as it happens, the Poles et al did but the Germans did not.

(For we must never forget that the Germans also took most of the fuel and warm clothing of the Jews, Poles and Ukrainian populations in Poland, which together with the reduced calories allotted to these groups, ensured millions (Jews and non-Jews alike) died of starvation diseases over the six years of war.)

In point of fact, for the entire war about half of the Germans in Greater Germany actually lived better, not worse, than they had during the dark days of the Depression.

In 1940-1941, Jews in Poland were reduced to a tenth and then a twelfth of the minimum calories needed for long term survival.

Locked inside tiny, crowded, walled and guarded ghettos, the Polish Jews also couldn't get much of the black market food and informal charity food that helped keep most people outside the ghettos eating a little above the official ration level.

Jewish death rates soared and kept on soaring.

But Holocausting the Jews by slow starvation (while requiring no scarce resources or manpower and while {regrettably} less morally offensive to outsiders than death by guns, rope and gas) wasn't dramatic enough for a regime starved of any more quick military successes after the Greek Campaign.

Successful quasi-military campaigns of mass shootings and mass gassings against defenceless civilians just felt so dynamic and so decisive.

And so these two efforts (later) became the public face of the Nazi form of Holocaust.

But we mustn't forget, that if the Nazis had been more militarily successful in Russia, the preferred method of an expanded Holocaust would have been slow starvation of not just ten million Jews but ten million Poles and thirty million or more Russians and Ukrainians.

If intentions, as opposed to actual actions, is what really measures a sin rather than a war crime, it seems clear that the Nazis proposed carrying out an unbelievably huge mass murder -- and then laid it out in Plain Sight before an indifferent world.....

When Jesus talked of "the first being last and the last being first", this sort of 'upending' talk was really one more of his famous hardsayings, designed usually to abruptly awake the intellectually smug and sleepy, rather than being offered as a serious description of His Father's world.

Equally, any idea that simply upending the current state of affairs in industry by replacing capitalist factory bosses with worker factory bosses would really improve things on the shop floor has been revealed to be, over and over, mere eyewash.

The hungriest of workers are just as capable of deceit and greed directed against others as the fattest of fat cats.

A more subtle and yet more probing claim is to insist that the smart aren't always smart and the dumb aren't always dump - that we all have qualities and weaknesses.

To accept all the assumptions of the usually smart without question is as dangerous as quickly dismissing all the qualities of the usually dumb as useless, without examining them all more carefully.

This was the implicit claim of a scientist from the second tier (Martin Henry Dawson) who lacked either the ability or the urge to talk scientific rhetoric about his insights - who preferred muchly to show, rather than to simply tell ...

Dr Martin Henry Dawson had basically but one single message to the wartime world of 1940 -1944.

It was that that a well known third or fourth rater (the penicillium slime found on our dank basement walls) nevertheless had at least one incredibly valuable capability.

For the despised penicillium fungus could make life-saving penicillin far, far, far better than the all the best human chemists in the world put together.

The means by which this message was revealed to the world was itself a subtle form of that same message.

This was because Dawson was himself a third or fourth rater as far as conventional human heroes go --- being far too diffident and deferential to his bosses, for just one thing.

But while Dawson would too easily bend and retreat, he also never really gave up, feeling himself duty bound to push forward - however ineptly - the world-changing insights his far-seeing eyes revealed.

Yes, his manner was alway timid but his thesis were often bold, often bold beyond measure.

That fact, coupled with his stolid determination to do what he felt was right, gave this nebbish doctor truly heroic qualities.

Without, at the same time, ever stop him from being well and truly nebbish.

Humans still can't make penicillin or most other beta lactam antibiotics.

At least, we can't make them anywhere as cheaply and as environmentally friendly as can the small, weak, under-rated (and frankly second or third rate) penicillium slime.

This is something worth remembering when we explore why Dr Martin Henry Dawson did not have a preferential option towards the poor, weak and small ---- all impressions garnered during WWII to the contrary.

Dawson's preferential option actually was for the special qualities hidden inside the supposed second and third raters

Dawson's point was rather along the lines that 'the mobility speed and grasping strength of the penicillium fungus (to re-use this familiar example) was indeed incredibly small and weak, third or fourth rate, at least when compared to that of humans or indeed of mice'.

But in 1940, Dawson felt the penicillium were being unfairly underrated totally, rather than selectively, by scientists and the public.

Because in some other areas, such as in making penicillin, the fungus were the world champions, far and away.

Each of us, no matter how 'advanced' or 'defective' we appear to be, has various weaknesses and strengths , together with some totally unique attributes.

In a total world of global commensality - as in a never yet seen Total War - there is always a need for a 'ministry of all the talents'.

A need for a world with all of us being valued for what we have and cherished for what we hold uniquely -- rather than being dismissed for what we have not have ......

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Years and years of the preppie jocks (the somebodies) dropping bombs on the losers, misfits, dorks and nobodies after class in the school yard, while most of the rest of us just looked on, bystanders ...

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

The beta lactam antibiotics, still the front line in our defence against bacterial infections, were hidden - for several billion years - In Plain Sight - literally right beneath our feet.

They come from soil mold - not mold in today's scientific sense of all being fungus - but mold as understood by today's laypeople and yesteryear's scientists (and maybe tomorrow's scientists too).

The soil molds that give us most of our beta lactam antibiotics are actually bacteria that so resemble the white thread-like fungus mold in appearance and habits that they seem kissing cousins.

And several hundred million years some of those kisses exchanged must have included enough initimate bodily fluids that at few fungus species picked up the DNA genes that make beta lactams.

The best known result is The Big Dog of all antibiotics : Penicillin itself.

The process is called HGT (horizontal gene transfer) - and it was Dr Martin Henry Dawson's hard slug effort in keeping this new concept before a bored and doubting scientific community that is Dawson's main claim to fame today.

No such fame for his equally hard slog to defend, before a hostile and doubting wartime scientific community, of the full worthiness of primitive penicillin made by the primitive penicillium.

His efforts, supported at crucial junctions by Dante Colitti and the Hearst media chain, by the WPB and by Pfizer, gave us all of our wartime penicillin and still provides us with almost all of our antibiotics, 75 years later.

But since Dawson's support for the overlooked, the under estimated, the unappreciated was life long affair, all of one piece, this perhaps appropriate.

In September 1940 ,Dawson's fifteen year interest in the under estimated survival abilities of avirulent microbes seemed totally unconnected to to his ten years commitment to the betterment of the unappreciated chronic ill poor in the big city holding tanks cum hospitals.

But on October 16th 1940, his 'Divided Self', to recall William James' famous phrase, finally fused.

Primitive Penicillium's 'burning and shining light'

For on that day, he injected primitive penicillin from those unappreciated microbe chemists the penicillium into humanity's lowest of the low, a black and a Jew dying from a disease judged of no military significance, the Polio of the Poor, SBE - subacute bacterial endocarditis.

And like that other diffident Henry from Nova Scotia (Henry Alline) he was now 'a man on a mission', for his few years left on Earth ....

If we ever did succeed in 'cleansing' the ocean of all of its germs (either by a deliberate Mikrobefrei Aktion or simply by continuing our limitless consumption of most of the world's resources) the atmosphere would fairly quickly lose half of its oxygen and humanity would rapidly die out.

This fact still isn't widely known by laypeople today - nor was it known by many scientists back in 1940.

I mention this only because the world in 1940 was as consumed with killing off all the germs in general, including those found in sea water, as the Nazis were about killing of all the Jewish 'germs' in particular.

The civilized world in 1940 widely supported the effort to greatly reduce biological diversity by ridding the world of all kinds of "pests", an idea that spilled over into the minds of the ordinary Nazi (and their ordinary/silent tolerators) when thinking about a possible solution for the 'problem' of the Jews.

The Sixth Extinction linked to the Sixth Genocide

Among the most annoying pests in 1940 was household mold - particularly the blue green penicillium slime found on fruit, leather goods and basement walls.

It seemed clear - in early 1940 - that the penicillium slime "would not be missed", to recall the words of the Lord High Executioner.

But by late 1944, it all wasn't at all so clear that the penicillium won't be missed.

During the Enlightenment Project, we assumed that via reductionism we would actually eventually fully know Nature and upon knowing it, evaluate its worth, bit by bit.

What bits to keep and what bits to dispose of.

To judge by the number of beetle species, God never put all the eggs in just one basket - so why should we ?

But we didn't really know Nature and we never will - the 1940 world thinking that it 'knew' the useless penicillium slime and the ocean's useless germs being but two sobering examples from the recent past....

Monday, July 20, 2015

"Burn 'em ,drown 'em" and even ----- "kick pregnant Japanese women in the belly" to more directly kill the little "bestial beasts".

Admiral Halsey's hate-filled comments - coming from one America's most famous and honoured WWII heroes - helps explain how some other humans (in the Eastern Europe part of that war) could come to personally kill thousands of little babies and still feel good about it ---- think they were merely solving a 'problem' forever.

And it reminds us that by dropping fire bombs on paper and wood cities, the Americans actually did kill tens of thousands of Japanese babies, albeit indirectly - the 'out of sight and out of mind' form of mass murder...

In early 1940, German propaganda films about their brutal invasion of Poland were still freely making the rounds of the cinemas of Neutral America.

Poet W.H. Auden, an Englishman Overseas at a time his home was at war, had ventured in one New York movie theatre to see the blond beast close up and personal.

But what really struck him was not the film itself but how the audience - mostly German-Americans - spontaneously began shouting out "Kill the Poles, Kill the Poles !!".

What might have been truly remarkable though would have been to hear ordinary Americans (fore-bearers from any country of origin) spontaneously shout out "Save the Poles, Save the Poles !!".

This was because forty years into the new Century, Victorian notions of charity, sympathy, empathy, chivalry and gallantry were pretty well gone, save only for employing vicariously at fictional films in the cinema.

In 1940 America, cheering the fictional underdog was alright ; fighting overseas to save real life underdogs was decidedly not.

Walter Mitty, I think it is only fair to say, was an avid Isolationist in his public politics, a brave Interventionist only in his wildest daydreams....

The natural historian out in the field or down on the ward floor as a frontline clinician has their own coin of the realm, their own passport to fame within their tribe.

But it is the directly opposite objective.

Fame comes to them when they bring home a new and highly unusual beetle specimen that seems to burst through these rigid categories and fit exactly no pigeonhole : something that only adds to, rather than diminishes Nature's plentitude.

To the reductionist oriented theoretical or lab scientist, in some very real sense, the one billion Chinese literally do look "all alike".

While to the ever more plentitude seeking naturalist, even their own children all look and act totally different.

It would be very nice to report that the natural philosopher, as a result of their tendency to see the commonalities in diverse beings, are leaders in seeing the common humanity in all nations of the world.

But on the evidence, that doesn't seem to have been the case very often.

They put everything on separate boxes - and then too easily chose to arrange those boxes in a vertical and unequal hierarchy of worthiness.

On the evidence, the natural historian's tendency to see the diversity of life has had a better record at seeing the hidden qualities in beings too often overlooked in a vertical hierarchy of life.

"Love your neighbour - no matter how scary or slimy or smelly - as you love yourself" - the naturalists' credo

During WWII, too many scientists saw all life as but consisting of nothing more than a common collection of a handful of elements that civilized man hoped to make and re-make artificially in his own labs, far above and away from the rest of Nature.

Very few WWII scientists were like Dr Martin Henry Dawson, who was always popping up from the eyepiece of his microscope to tell his bored colleagues about newly discovered amazing and under-appreciated qualities he had just found in the easily overlooked tiny microbes.

They were probably just as bored when he returned from his rounds as the Goldwater Hospital for the chronically ill poor of New York, to report much the same about these overlooked and under-appreciated segments of our common humanity.

I don't think his colleagues ever really 'got it', but later in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as postwar "Penicillium Kids", my fellow boomers and I fully got it ....

I believe that Adorno and Horkheimer only got part of the correct explanation for why the Modernity Project so abruptly started dying in 1945, supposedly the moment of its greatest triumph.

Not because they were Central European Jews - it was right for them to intellectually fixate on the Nazis' industrial mass murdering of an entire people - because at the time no one else really was.

Their failure lay, I believe, in being old.

Old, at least relative to school age children.

For Adorno and Horkheimer was only in their forties when they were writing and revising their Dialectic of the Enlightenment, the first book to recognize the death of modernity.

In the 1950s (and for centuries earlier) early and middle adulthood was a relatively healthy time - violent deaths from accidents, wars and suicides aside.

It was actually in early childhood that lay the huge number of deaths from infectious disease that so skewed the entire life expectancy statistics downward.

At my schools, I knew kids whose older siblings had died from polio and kids who went away and never came back , because of 'leukemia'.

And in my family alone, we had already had scarlet fever and rheumatic fever together with measles and chicken pox.

I could tell by the response of our elderly neighbours they were very frightening diseases -at least when they were young mothers.

My mother, a former medical lab tech, rushed to reassure me that, thanks to penicillium fungus and other microbes, these diseases were far less fearsome 'Since the War'.

From all the late night war movies I had watched with my parents since the age of six, I hadn't seen much evidence that the second world war had brought anything but tragic deaths and tears.

That the war had also brought us child's life saving antibiotics made a terrible big impression on this particular small child.

Perhaps if Adorno and Horkheimer had been young mothers (or even today's young fathers) while they were writing their masterwork, they might have seen that badness of Auschwitz alone couldn't kill the delusion of endlessly upward human Progress. in the minds of most humanity.

Because before we can dismiss a bad idea, we need a good idea to replace it.

Antibiotics, coming as they did from the despised fungus and microbes in the constantly overlooked soil right beneath our feet, was just that symbol of a hope-filled alternative way of looking at our fellow humans and the world.

Because the adults, like Adorno and Horkheimer, didn't really see this, everything had to wait until we 1950s kids got older.

The "Penicillium Kids"

When we did, in the mid and late 1960s, it was us postwar "Penicillium Kids" who started the postmodern recognition of rights for all types of people and beings that had been as traditionally overlooked as the soil microbes had once been ...

As a religiously devote child in the Fifties, I somehow got the impression that WWII only ended because the penicillium fungus (David) was saving more kids than Civilization (Goliath) was capable of gassing or bombing.As an adult, I realize now that I was not far wrong.From opposing moral positions, Dr Henry Dawson's primitive penicillium and the advanced Auschwitz doctors, together, put the fatal 'post' into modernity.And so, gradually, we collectively changed our minds. No longer did we believe biological progress to be linear --- and exclusively directed towards human 'civilization'. Instead it involved all creatures and proceeded in all directions.But it seems that not everyone got the memo. Old guard believers in "man-centred" Progress are still around and still destroying this planet.I believe my book about the Dawsonian revolution, about the 'other' Manhattan Project, is that true rarity : a page-turning Good News Story from that Bad News War.And if re-telling it helps in any small way to forestall the rush to destroy this planet in the Sixth Extinction, so much the better...

Sunday, July 19, 2015

As 'literature', there isn't much in common between Anne Morrow Lindbergh's airy if wooly personal essay style 1940 "Wave of the Future" and Michael Prell's 2013 dense cut-and-paste thesis "Underdogma".

But in terms of actual intent, there is surprisingly little difference between the pair.Isolationist Republican Lindbergh implies, in part, that America's traditional enemy, Britain, is once again trying to exploit American' heartfelt empathy for the underdog - here being Europe's smaller nations falling before Hitler and Stalin's might - to once again to try and drag America into Britain's wars, for Britain's benefit.

Tea Party Republican Prell says that that America's newest enemies (the Moslems being the most prominent) are exploiting Americans' traditional empathy towards the underdog to undercut Americians' sense of their right (simply because they are so big and so powerful) to lead the free world by dictatorial fiat and the bloody sword.

The upper/inner dogs (because they control "big business") always condemn any actions by what they call "big government"; actions that actually are designed to protect the small under/outer dogs from the big upperdogs

Both Lindbergh and Prell say that in terms of evolutionary success, Might is self evidently Right : current "big" successes speak for themselves.

But Darwin never said that.

Evolutionary success for him was limited to re-productive success, with the emphasis on the re-.

His theory was niche oriented and hence time based, not numbers based.

Darwin said, in effect, that a species that reproduced a trillion individual members over each of twenty generations and then went extinct was much less of an evolutionary success than a species that reproduced only a few thousand members over at least ten thousand generations and yet is still going strong.

This is because the smaller species lived in a much smaller niche so its small numbers were hardly a surprise - but its long term survival was a clear sign of its greater evolutionary success.

Misunderstanding Darwinism and abusing it, in the social arena, seems to never go out of style.

Saturday, July 18, 2015

In September 1940, fearing the internment of German Jewish refugee scientists - even possibly those with recent American citizenship - was bound to follow the panicky British Empire decision to most of its German refugees from Hitler, biochemist Dr Karl Meyer became the first leader of what was to become the four year long Manhattan penicillin Project.

Dr Meyer was determined to find some sort of way to prove to the American war machine that he was too valuable to intern.

And finally purifying a drug that could kill the few militarily important pathogen bacteria that the hot new Sulfa drugs could not, would do just that.

Purifying a natural substance is sometimes by far the most difficult step on the road to then synthetizing and patenting it.

Any clinical testing could wait until the substance was safely purified.

For now, what Meyer and his assistant Eleanor Chaffee needed most from their two microbiologists (doctors Dawson and Hobby) was their highly practised skills in growing microbes.

And then later, their other well honed skill in measuring the bacteria-killing powers of any substances Meyer's chemical skills threw up.

But all that changed in early October 1940, when new patient A. (Leroy) Alston heard of the project and in a very real sense, hijacked the leadership of the project.Leroy was a young black man from Harlem, dying of then invariably fatal SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis) the disease that made Rheumatic Fever the leading killer of young people until the 1960s.

Significantly most of those deaths occurred among the poor, immigrants and minorities.

And Leroy didn't like the idea of accepting a SBE death as inevitable, just the assigned fate for America's poor and minorities.

Didn't like it at all - not one bit.

And Leroy was just the sort of person - dying or not - to be able to make significant waves.

He was raised by a poor widow in Harlem who sometimes got waitressing work - but Leroy held down a middle class job at a white commercial insurance firm all through the Dirty Thirties.

A first class athlete in many different sports, he also founded and ran a pioneering track and field club made up of members from the Harlem's black working class.

That club, Harlem's Mercury Athletic Club, competed successfully, not just against the nation's top black (middle class) universities but also against the top white teams as well.

To Leroy, it was always much more than just athletic success - he self consciously sought out obstacles to the ability for blacks to compete on an equal terms with whites - and then challenged them.

In a word, Leroy was a fervent Civil Rights activist - from the Thirties era.

The reason for his unexpected success is best explained by going back to the High Schools that all of us have experienced.

The Jocks cum Preppies in my High School (and probably in your school as well) were indeed mostly made up of kids from the community's best off families - but by no means exclusively.

What they really held in common was not income or race but a winning combination of physical and social agility - they moved gracefully and persuaded gracefully.

By contrast I knew many kids in my high school, from the top families, with all the family resources in the world, were seemingly just born shy, awkward and socially inept.

Leroy was just one of High School Life's natural born leaders and orators.

And in this particular case, this natural born leader had an audience of just one person to persuade : Dr M (Henry) Dawson, senior of the two microbiologists on Meyer's tiny four person team.

Dawson was also the only member with clinical (ward) privileges - and at a relatively high level too.

He was the only one on the team with both the legal right and the practical ability within the hospital culture to inject new untested un-purified medicine to a patient without his superiors putting up (too) much of a fuss.

Even in the most research oriented teaching hospitals, the frontline ward doctor directing patient care stands far higher in the informal hierarchy than does the most senior of the supporting staff, such as the microbiologists and biochemists back in the labs.

And Dawson had just been elevated to associate attending physician status, with an entire admission ward under his direct control and yet he had never really exercised his new powers so far.

Leroy couldn't help noticing all the recent publicity and fundraising dollars devoted to Polio, which killed far less than did Rheumatic Fever/SBE, but affected predominantly white kids from the hyper-clean and spacious suburbs rather than ethnic minorities crowded into inner city tenements.

Rheumatic Fever, by contrast, by 1940 was getting far less attention and funding than had been traditionally the case.

This made him angry and as it happened, it made Dawson even angrier.

Dawson had long seen a long slow shift away from charity to self help cum narrow self interest in the world generally and his belief was well supported by the facts.

The case of polio was particularly instructive.

Usually the March of Dimes is seen as an example of progress in human affairs : the (usually middle class) families of patients with a particular disease banding together to act as a advocacy and fundraising group for their relatives's disease.

But in an earlier age, middle class people donated money freely to help people in need who they didn't even know - this sort of selfless (agape) giving is the true definition of charity - not something you do to help your nearest and dearest or to get a tax deduction.

Hospitals - like Columbia Presbyterian where Dawson worked - had once freely treated those in most need of help with the least funds to pay for it.

Now it only treated the poor if their cases were unique enough to teach the (mostly middle class) medical students well enough to ensure them of a lifetime high income and higher status.

Similarly nations had once went to war - heedless of the cost - to battle to defend the rights of the smallest,weakest nations like Belgium to survive.

Now nations stood silently, bystanders, as Belgium and other small nations got gobbled up, saying it wasn't in their nation's self interest to intervene.

And America's medical schools, like Columbia Presbyterian, in that Fall of 1940, were moving away from their increasingly weak efforts towards Social Medicine (medical research aiding the weakest members of society, regardless of their ability to pay).

Instead they were moving towards War Medicine (medical research oriented to aiding the most fit members in society - her soldiers.)

But Dawson's anger - though in keeping with his character he usually kept it carefully reined in and undercover - was also directed at his colleagues for dismissing his research into the ability of microbes to do many things that the most advanced human civilizations were incapable of.

Meyer in a sense was partially a mouthpiece for such conventional beliefs.

The idea that penicillin was not safe to inject into humans until it was purified by humans was hardly his alone - it was universal in the worldwide medical community since 1928.

But Dawson began to reason that the fungus had probably been making penicillin for hundreds of millions of years and had probably got it down to a science.

After all, he probably reminded Meyer, they already successfully made penicillin at normal atmospheric pressures and normal temperatures and without strong expensive toxic reagents - not something Meyer, even if he was to become totally successful, could ever likely claim.

Dawson had two hands - in his quiet passively aggressive way , on a day when no bosses were around - Draft Registration Day October 16 1940, he could give the world two fingers.

Reluctantly, quietly but firmly, Dawson became the third leader of the project.

On that day, Dawson would give the world's first ever penicillin injections, ushering the Age of Antibiotics.

And do so by using (a) a medicine made by conventional evolutionary biology's under-estimated underdogs (tiny penicillium cells) to aid (b) society's under-estimated underdogs - Jewish and black youths from NYC's working class ....

By contrast, the tiny and relatively brief (less than four years) effort to win (grudging) acceptance for 'primitive' penicillin was unfunded and unsupported, received no scholarly study or public honours ---- and was a huge, world-changing, success.

Seventy five years later, annually thousands of tons of 'Primitive' penicillin are still made the good old primeval way - by incredibly tiny fungal factories - and still form the basis for almost all of our life-saving antibiotics.

"Upending" - the blog, the musical and backstory non-fiction book - tries to make amends.

For "Upending" is based around the proposition that massive success usually deserves more attention than failure, even if (particularly if ?) that failure was supported by all the Smartest Men in the Universe...

Thursday, July 16, 2015

I well recall the very first time I first read, in the book "YELLOW MAGIC", how five gallon carboys of incredibly delicate penicillium slime effluent were daily - and carefully - taxied through NYC's hellish traffic all the way from Brooklyn to a hospital at the top of Manhattan.

All in a desperate effort to save lives and how, despite best efforts, the material often arrived destroyed and perhaps another life lost as a result.

At that moment, I shouted out to Rebecca : "MOVIE, MOVIE, MOVIE - finally a science story just made for the Big Screen !".

Too often a movie about an incredibly important science breakthrough has to compress time and 'gussy-up' the long drawn out and usually boring activities to make it dramatic enough for the camera.

But Dr Martin Henry Dawson's little Manhattan Project was a story so incredibly cinematic they would actually have to tone it down to make it seem creditable.

Others, I am sure, will make movies of Dawson's efforts (lots of movies because my writing has all been assigned to the Public Domain).

But I won't take any part in it : why set my sights so low ?

I began to see that Dawson's tale was really the tip of a much bigger story and that cinema's commitment to realism would only graze the surface of its emotional core.I began to see a sung-through pop-idiom musical, designed to be performed by amateur young people - High Schoolers and University undergraduates, or in church youth groups.

The musical would be set entirely in Dr Dawson's Presbyterian Hospital,in the period between October 1940 and August 1944 (with the final scene, in May 1945, set at his other hospital, the Goldwater).

In each of the musical's thirty scenes, the actors not singing at any particular moment would miming silently but broadly the appropriate physical activities for that scene.

The supporting actors would play many different roles, but within one broad type, indicated by three different colored garbs : patients and their families' green johnny shirt, good guys' white lab coat, bad guys' blue suit jacket top etc.

But the few actors playing the main roles ---representing (a) key individuals who were also (b) present through most of the four and a half years of the actual events --- would remain the same.

The facts of the story says there were only about seven - two patients and the four to five members of Dawson's tiny team.

Dawson's real life opponents were very many and each appeared in his part of the hospital too infrequently to be accurately cast as Dawson's 'main opponent' in the musical.

Think of them as a broad collective, "The Suits", rather than anyone living breathing individual.

A huge screen at the back of the stage would play faux newsreel type film footage, setting the contemporary context that month of the war for each scene.

I have long felt that amateur-oriented plays that force all would-be actors to be part of the live drama excludes many amateurs who might convincing play roles, if put in a situation where their role is filmed without a live audience, in little bitty takes, with opportunities for many retakes and then 'fixing in the edit.'

So this all this background newsreel material should be obviously recreated, clearly faux and well 'guyed up', to fit in with the staginess of the rest of the musical.

The volume of these backstage pre-recorded "voices & sfx off" would automatically dip down ("ducking") whenever the front stage live actors sing or talk in brief asides.

Spoken asides only, because there is no dialogue but plenty of feisty alternating singing duets and trios.

A single scene might have as many as six different solo voices and I very much see the voices as being untrained and of widely different timbre and singing capability.

This differing vocal timbre and vocal capability will help muchly to convey the conflict between the differing stakes for each person in each scene.

Instrumentally, the verse, chorus, bridge, intro, outro, solo etc remains much the same on each repeat but the lyrics above won't (though their vocal melody remains the same.)

But these differing lyrics will remain lyrically coherent because they remain fixated upon the same issue/conflict, merely expressed slightly different takes on it, upon each repetition.

For example, a patient gets bad news and expresses horror about her situation the first time her verse music comes around, then resignation the second time and finally a renewed commitment to fight it on on the third go around.

The music below her vocalizing, in terms of melody, metre , tempo, etc sounds roughly the same but is actually subtly different - going from minor to major, faster slower, etc to reflect her changing mood.

Basic opera stuff really (cantabile and cabaletta) but the music and the lyrics are more like Michael Stipes's verses in such songs as World Leader Pretend or Night Swimming.

It is singing but it sounds almost like conversational ad-libbed thinking aloud.

Currently, opera and musicals, to my mind, are self-hobbled by making an earlier technical requirement (the need to be profitable required big theatres which meant big voices before the era of microphones) into an aesthetic choice towards prioritizing big voiced singing.

I simply want them to embrace microphones in the same way they embraced electric lighting and the use of the internet to sell their tickets.

But before you can fictionalize a real life story, your potential Musical goers must know that real life story --- because half the fun is seeing it compressed artistically to wring out every last emotional bone in it.

So this blog's fact-correct posts (the more narrative ones in particular) will do that.

I don't plan them to become a book in the conventional sense ( but again as they are all in the Public Domain, for the Public Good, so others are free to do just that).

But for times away from a connection to the internet (and for those people who simply hate reading anything lengthy online), I will bundle the six or so character vignettes that represent the events of each scene seen from a wide number of perspectives, into little EPUBs and printable PDFs of about 10,000 words each.

Five acts, each representing about a year's worth of events but also representing the real life 'ups and downs' in the real life dramatic arc.

Thirty scenes, each set on one particular day but incorporating the backstory since the last scene ; each with about six separate character vignettes.

About 300,000 words in total.

The libretto to the "based-upon-actual-events" Musical, I will eventually publish, as a book, albeit into the Public Domain.

I will try, in words, to describe the music I hear for each set of lyrics.

But I doubt very much that I will actually try to write out the musical notes ----- or try to sing the complete demo of the Musical.

Mostly science talk was was all about the big and about Man - big science run by big important men in big governments and big armies and big factories in big important countries.

Science as the topdog and Science as the TV high school jock set among nations, institutions and individuals.

But when it came to life-saving antibiotics for disease-prone little kids (a subject obviously hitting close to home for me) science was always about digging up dark jungle mud, scrapping smelly slime off basement walls or dipping into the effluent laden water at the mouth of sewer outfalls.

Antibiotics, we were told, were not man-made, not synthetic, but made by tiny invisible little microbes.

And judging by where these microbes hung out, I could clearly see even then that these marvellous lifesavers were from the TV high schools' loser side of the tracks - greasers and trailer trash.

There was one more puzzling thing about these antibiotics - they all came out of the Second World War and as far as I could see, were about the old good thing to ever come out of the awful war.

We didn't talk much back then - none of us - about the advanced civilization that produced the Auschwitz medical experiments, but we had all heard and seen - in TV sci fi serials and movies, if nowhere else - what the A-bomb could do to the human body.

And we all much preferred antibiotics like penicillin, big needle and all, to the A-bomb.

And we found it hard to marry together just how any civilization could produce both such a killer bomb and such a lifesaver pill, all out of the same horrible war ....

Since the Russians were hard into eastern Poland by the end of 1944, it has always seemed believable to most people that Himmler himself ordering the gas chambers to stop working as of November 1944 and for the SS to destroy all evidence of their existence.

No evidence of this 'order' has ever come to light, but clearly with the Russian front lines only a few dozen kilometres away, the local camp commanders and SS staff knew they had to stop, quickly destroy all the chambers (and the remaining prisoners) and then move back West pronto.

But forgotten in all this was the fact that there were still many many concentration (cum work cum elimination) camps still in Germany itself.

(Because only a handful camps were entirely about the quick elimination of as many Jews as possible - most freely mixed their activities up).

Ravensbruck was Hitler's only all women concentration camp ,home to women from two dozen nations and where at least 50,000 died.

(Lots of children and babies died there too - usually by being quickly deliberately murdered rather than by being worked to death like their mothers.)

Most women died by overwork and underfeeding - but many also by executions for any small or imaginary infraction ---- or in ghastly medical experiments.

And after November 1944, death came in a new form - via a brand new gas chamber.

It ran on and on and on until just before the camp was overrun near the very end of the war.

For some reason, any mention of Ravensbruck and its gaschamber (maybe due to its extremely late start up date, who knows?) brings the Holocaust deniers out of the woodwork, as any Google search on the two words will reveal.

But the story of Ravensbruck is real and it needs to be much better known : and I think Sarah Helm has done it, in her book "If this were a Woman".....

They dutifully and cheerfully always passed their essays in on time, never skipped class, and when not in the library ( researching, not flirting) were in the high school band or orchestra, no doubt playing like the oboe or something equally, well, nerdy.

The socially adept jocks became natural up front politicians, running first for high school president and then American President.

Meanwhile the more studious, honest and charisma-challenged types were 'urged' to fill the tiring, detail-filled backroom jobs because someone has to step into the breech and it might as well be you - again.

It is hard today to imagine the pocket-protecting chemist ever being seen as the jock and the topdog, but between the wars this was so - chemistry was just so cool, so powerful.

A Swot's revenge indeed when the ultimate underdogs, basement penicillium slime and working class SBEs, turned tables on the topdog jock chemists near the end of WWII...

After enrolling in a four year BA at Dalhousie University in the Fall of 1913, Martin Henry Dawson joined the Great War in the Fall of 1915 - and yet he graduated* with a BA granted in absentia in the Spring of 1916.

Martin Henry's selection of courses at Dal hadn't exhibited any inclination to a career in science or medicine - he had taken only the required basic chemistry class and one elective in basic biology.

He did have very good Maths, German and Latin which (albeit indirectly) would only help a future would be med student.

In his first two years at Dal (his only two years at Dal), he naturally couldn't have taken too many electives or advanced level courses.

The only elective he took two courses in - and one at the highest level (6) that he got to, before war called, was --- wait for it ----- philosophy !

Could it be that a career as a philosopher and a thinker lay before him ?

Interestingly, his marks were unusual poor in these philosophy courses - why he continued to take them then is an interesting mystery.

(On a personal note, my father was also embarked on a career as a philosopher before the Korean War suddenly called - he didn't resume that career until a decade later.)

In the Fall of 1919, Dawson enters McGill's med program.

By the time of the 1920-1921 calendar, he is indicated as a third year student in medicine - which would seem remarkable progress for someone with half a BA and with very little science.

It is true he was smart and hardworking.

And he was a genuine young hero to the grateful adults running McGill : winning an MC with citation for bravery during the war.

Perhaps more importantly he had spent a year at a very busy wartime base hospital as a private/orderly and his two wartime wounds had also meant he had spent two years in and out of hospitals and convalescent homes and before endless medical boards.

Dawson had gotten his medical acculturation, like most everything he ever got in life , 'the hard way' ....

+++++

*His older brother Howard has also entered Dalhousie the same year and at the same academic level as Martin Henry.

But despite finishing a good deal more courses than Martin (Howard had enrolled both in first year pre-Engineering and then first year pre Law) never got his BA when he left for the war about the same time.

Howard died fighting for his country's and university's values in that war.

Not granting him a BA before he went was really a small-minded mistake.

It could still be rectified by Dal, as we mark both one hundred years since the Great War and the 200th anniversary of the university itself...

German women, at the very least, allowed the Holocaust, Aktion T4 and other horrors of the Nazi era to go ahead.

Conversely, their wholesale public revulsion would have at least slowed it down.

The Nazi leadership never forgot the widespread protest of hungry housewives that hastened the surrender of Germany in WWI and greatly feared it repetition.

So much so that it is now a commonplace among a new generation of historians to argue that keeping the German family well fed during wartime no matter what led to the worst actions of the Nazis in the occupied lands.

In Simple Wiki speak : bad harvests back home led to wars and lead them to kill millions and millions people, simply to steal their food.Very few of us have ever heard that least a half million women served Hitler's evil ways in the occupied lands - let alone what they did there.

Mostly very young, these German women in the occupied territories did everything, from typing the paperwork for the transport trains to the death camps, to bookkeepers counting the stolen loot.

Right up to the nurses and guards who gave the fatal needles or shot children in the face after hands-on torturing them.

Of course most German women stayed home.

But they were hardly guilt free : these women also silently accepted the daily mistreatment of enslaved peoples - all the millions of enslaved workers clearly being mistreated at their factory or farm.

Silently accepting as well, all the new apartments and new belongings made available when their Jewish neighbours 'disappeared' to the Eastern death camps, whose existence was known by virtually all, even if only as a whispered rumour.

Millions of German housewives saw that their families remained very well fed up to the last days of the war, while they knew families in the occupied lands were starving.

That was a big difference from the extremely harsh Great War food conditions which almost all these women directly remembered as a housewife or as a child.

Yet Germany wasn't producing any more food now in this war than in the last --- so they had to know where all the extra - and clearly foreign - food was coming from and how it was obtained.

Because their husbands and boyfriends told them.

How, despite the occupied lands being grossly starved, their foodstuffs remained miraculously widely available to Germans at ridiculously low prices.

That sort of 'good luck' for the Germans and 'bad luck' for the occupied people just couldn't have happened by accident.

Despite all this, literally only a handful of the tens of millions of guilty German women were tried, convicted and their sentence carried out fully.

A very few feminist historians have had the courage to address why women have been written out of the Nazi story (except as victims).

Wendy Lower's Hitler's Furies is one of the best.

In a few places, it is very hard to read, at least for the almost all of us who hold a special place in our hearts for children and still naively believe that all women feel the same.

However, it is unique in also examining in detail the lives of the more ordinary German women working in the occupied lands and hence allows one to begin to get inside the heads of those half million female Nazi assistants.

Lower's is one of the best books on this subject and rightly one of the best known too.

But I also want to add a male feminist to the list : Gotz Aly.

He is always provocative (and that rare non-tenured historian who tenured historians read and respond to in a professional manner.)

His "Hitler's Beneficiaries" is a successful attempt to show how every single (non-imprisoned) German benefited from stolen loot and from food stolen from the starving - and how every adult knew well how it came in their hands.

And in war, the majority of those stay-at-home loot profiteers were inevitably women.

It is troubling that these historians have been so alone in all of this .

Their published efforts, involving as they do the moral behavior of the majority of humanity (women), while hardly ignored by professional historians, haven't really become popular discussion books among ordinary people.

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

We already have a pretty clear (albeit highly stereotyped) image of the sort of people who join college chess clubs, as opposed to say ending up captaining the football team.

Equally, we know the type of person who always agree to 'help out a good cause' by ending up on the executives of clubs and societies.

But always they are consigned to the dogsbody recording secretary role in the background ----- never the glamorous upfront president.

And we know the difference between those natural leaders of every classroom (the students who can charm teacher or pupils alike without ever reading the course materials) and their opposites : the charisma-less swots with their heads in the books who always get the best marks.

Martin Henry Dawson's older brothers were more in the charming and natural leader category, while he was 100% full swot.

And yet, a clue as to how he 'led without being a natural leader' might lie in his strong sense of justice and instinctive support for the underdog.

Right up to his dying day, for a good cause, Henry Dawson never could say no.

And in his own modest way: once onboard, he wouldn't let go either.

All in all, a man very easy to badly underestimate....

+++++

So far, I have found him as business manager for his high school annual yearbook cum newspaper, secretary (treasurer) of his university chess club and of his undergraduate medical student society.

He was secretary of innumerable organizations over his entire life.

Someone willing to step into the breech, hardworking reliable, honest but not a dynamic or aggressive leader.

And he was also 'one council rep among many' on numerous occasions.

But for the very few times he headed up ending any organization, I think only special circumstances (no other candidate?) put him there.

It seemed he was never the natural choice of the membership considering who to vote for to represent their organization.

From would-be lawyer (destined to defend the underdog) to a doctor and scientist defending the underdog ?

With no private papers available, it is hard to know for sure what really motivated pioneering medical scientist Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson, the first person to ever put DNA to work in a test tube and the first to ever inject an antibiotic (Penicillin) into a patient.

Dr Dawson, MD was actually enrolled in Arts at Dalhousie University, before the Great War changed everything.

But, from what we know of his adult personality and from his best marks in university, I would see him, if the war hadn't intervened, more as a university teacher - perhaps in history or perhaps teaching theory in law school.

Unusually for a scientist, he took no sciences courses as an undergraduate - except one in biology (where he topped his class).

His skill in German turned out to be very helpful - no great scientist before 1945 could really succeed if they couldn't read scientific German with smooth facility.

But his best courses are in areas like history, economics and philosophy.

It is important to recall he got his wartime BA degree after attending relatively few classes because he had such good marks in the few courses he did complete, before he left for the effort overseas.

Henry Dawson was far too studious to ever stop at a mere BA and then go on to teach high school - yet he never (so far as we can tell) formally enrolled in the pre-law, pre-engineering or pre-med options at Dal.

But ever loyal to his slightly older brother Howard, he might have joined him at law school but for the war.

Yet he didn't seem to have the commanding personality needed to be a successful courtroom lawyer defending the underdog.

And he certainly never ever wanted to be well off, let alone rich, as in 'rich corporate lawyer'.But while at Dal, Dawson was busy helping teaching English to various foreign seamen at the YMCA mission to seamen, perhaps parallel to his brother Howard's similar involvement in evangelical good works.

And for what it is worth, his older brother Frank, while an engineering Dean in the American Mid West, so impressed a pioneering black engineering student with his non-prejudiced kindnesses, that the man fulsomely remembered Frank Dawson years later in his autobiography.

The entire family was not military minded but when they were needed - when poor little bleeding Belgium was betrayed by the Hun - all five boys stepped into the breach.

Belgium - again an underdog.

Henry was a (medically untrained) private in a university organized overseas military hospital at first.

Later Dawson was made an officer in the infantry and while badly wounded in the foot, still gave up his place in a stretcher for another much more wounded ordinary soldier, (an underdog) this after solving a battlefield crisis by running about on his wounded foot for ten hours.

His foot never really recovered as a result, but he received the Military Cross with citation for this selfless act.

Then at the very end of his wartime service and wounded yet again, Dawson changed his peacetime occupation from just "student" to "medical student".

His career changed - but I argue - not his urge to helping the underdog.

His lifelong concerns, as a ward doctor, were the chronically ill poor - then as now a low priority in high prestige teaching hospitals.

Underdogs of the medical world.

As a medical scientist, his interest was in the underdogs of the underdog microbes - then universally seen as primitive, primeval, weak, simple, small --- the ultimate in the living fossils.

So why then were they still here ?

If evolutionary theory was correct, Dawson wondered, shouldn't the weak and the small have long ago been vanquished by the big and the brutal ?

The microbes were once again the underdogs, the Rodney Dangerfields, of the Living World.

As a medical scientist, Dawson was particularly concerned about the harmless - hence uninteresting to other medical scientists - avirulent commensal bacteria.

Avirulent versions of 'normally' pathogenic bacteria were considered to be defective versions (of a lifeform already -see above - considered to be a living fossil).

So why then ,asked Dawson, were they still here inside us, often inside us for perhaps our entire lives -- undestroyed ?

Here is the contemporary explanation that Dawson objected to - see if you too can see its flaws in basic logic :

(1) The pneumonia bacteria can only survive in or on us - we are its only home.

(2) The normal variant of the bacteria that causes lung pneumonia and blood poisoning is deadly virulent and lives alone, floating in the blood and human intercell liquids, usually killing us (and them) in a week or two.

(3) The disease of lung pneumonia is not really contagious -- we can't really catch it from the coughing of a dying man -and remember with his death, so to die the bacteria (see #1 above).

(4) The abnormal, defective, avirulent, version harmlessly exists in tight massive colonies on the inner surfaces of our nose and throat - sometimes for our whole lives, without ever making us sick.

(5) We all have these harmless pneumonia bugs in our noses some of the time - some of us all our lives - and when we have them, we are known as 'carriers' of these harmless commensal pneumonia bacteria.

Dawson wondered how a short life of a week or two in the lungs or blood streams of just a few of us (for even before penicillin, pneumonia bugs only killed perhaps 8% of us) could qualify as the normal form of existence for this bug.

All this, when 100% of us had the abnormal quote unquote bug in our noses for periods ranging from months and months to decades and decades ?

Haven't the normal definitions of usual and unusual been deliberately up-ended to suit an universally accepted but ultimately bizarre medical theory ?

Dawson's alternative explanation was that whether floating about alone in liquid or clinging in masses to walls, these were just normal evolutionary responses to changed niches.

If bacteria do the shapeshifting so quickly, it is not really just that they are much more plastic in the forms that they can adopt than we are capable of - it is also the simple math that a new generation to them can mean 25 minutes later not 25 years later as with us.

As a result, evolutionary response to a new crisis can happen a million times faster with them than us.

If we are honest with ourselves, an evolutionary response time like that is a big advantage and a big reason why these living fossils are still around.

Dawson spent his life tracking down the variants of bacteria that he believed demonstrated why these supposed underdogs were really Life's evolutionary topdogs.

He was the first, or among the first, to look at things like DNA-HGT,quorum sensing, molecular mimicry, CWD bacteria, biofilms and persisters.

Three quarters of a century or more later, those are still cutting edge scientific topics.

In 1940, scientific opinion was again convinced the underdog fungal slimes were incapable of making penicillin as efficiently and as cheaply as the topdog chemists of advanced human civilizations could.

Dawson disagreed - pioneering the Antibiotics Age - when he injected their 'primitive' penicillin into Aaron Alston and Charles Aronson on October 16 1940.

He was right - the topdog chemists failed totally and the underdog slime still makes all the basis of our lifesaving beta-lactam antibiotics to this very day.

When the Allied medical-political elite agreed that wartime penicillin would only go to the topdog frontline troops, Dawson characteristically objected and said all of us, dying for lack of penicillin, should receive it, war or not.

Dawson was himself dying but he gave up his life to - once again - fight for the underdog.

A life full of variations but always with that same consistency of conduct ....

Monday, July 13, 2015

We don't permit history profs - on their way to granting our kid an expensive university degree - to teach only the successes of the Nazis and never their failures.

So why in the name of truth and beauty do we permit science profs to do just that about science's many failures ?

Why do we let them get away with the nonsense that eugenics was only a pseudo science and never a real science - when we know it was taught in thousands of universities and colleges around the world for over half a century ?

In 1940, far more people around the world had earned their way into professional status in part by passing such eugenics courses than had by passing courses in sub pseudo-atomic physics.

Orwell would have learned much more about doublespeak by ignoring Hitler and Stalin and devoting himself to the tabletalk of any number of Nobel Prize winning scientists.

Consider the powerful if deadly poetic phrase 'living fossil' : how on earth could something be both living and lost since dead ?

The Romas were considered thus - along with any number of other 'primitive' tribes also destined for the SS bath facilities in the event of total victory.

The term 'living fossils' was actually just a clever way to evade Dr Dawson's probing question : if the bacteria actually are that stupid and weak and simple and primitively primeval - why in the name of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer are they still here ?

Or could it be that about the only thing a lab scientist won't reduce down to its basic basics in his beakers and burners is his own profession's mis-practises ??

So let me go out on a long long long intellectual limb and tie the postwar white world's reluctant de-colonization of Africa and Asia to the wartime success of primitive penicillin.

By 1945, the religious element justifying the imperialist dominance over supposedly lesser beings was nearly moribund, long since replaced by the claims of the 'clearcut' scientific superiority of whites over darkies (and by implication, dark fungus as well).

We weren't enslaving Africa - oh no, we were bringing it the boon of advanced European medicine.

But in 1945, advanced European medicine actually meant the horrific medical experiments of Auschwitz scientists while it was left to the supposedly impossibly primitive fungus slime to bring the real boon of lifesaving penicillin to Africa and the world.

And if you could make primitive but effective penicillin in any jungle hospital lab, Africa no longer needed their European overlords to lead them around like blind children.....

Traditionally, immense philosophical differences between three "clusterings of ideologies" are said to be the reason for the intensity of violence that was WWII.

So one clustering group, for example, claimed to be benevolent-to-their-own-race racists.

The Germans claimed to be protecting the white race and the Japanese claiming to protect the yellow (or even all colored races).

Perhaps fortunately for the entire world, this was doubletalk.

The two were actually only nationalists cum imperialists : the Germans treated most other whites almost as badly as they hoped to mistreat the coloreds, just as the Japanese treated fellow yellow races at least as badly as they mistreated whites.This narrow nationalism destroyed both nations' ability to unite the wide and strong coalitions needed to defeat their many opponents.

The various kinds of Marxists and Communists all started out claiming they intended to take everything from the world's middle class and give it all to the world's working class.

And after an initial violent overthrow of the existing system, they promised to end state executions.

And indeed they did start out by taking from the rich and giving to the poor - if the poor is defined as the upwardly mobile urban industrial working class.

But soon they all began to take from everybody and give it mostly to massive military buildups against imaginary enemies, so somewhat continuing to benefit the industrial worker, but also ensuring that the working class didn't get too much of the nation's new wealth and start feeling frisky.

In addition, a very generous share went to an entirely new middle class cum ruling-forever class made up from some of the smarter, more ambitious and more ruthless children of the working class.

Even more depressingly, the communists in all the various nations in which they seized power soon acted exactly the same way against their minorities and neighbouring nations as the previous aristocratic and capitalist rulers had done.

And to do so, they secretly murdered millions of all sorts of people over the decades, all the while publicly claiming to have ended capital punishment, except in cases of treason.

Once again deep rooted narrow nationalism cum imperialism seemed to have trumped the nominal world-wide official ideology.

And yes, doubletalk once again - though in this case, there seemed a widespread and genuine surprise among marxist & communist intellectuals that it all ended up this way.

The third clustering gathered the rest of the world's nations, be they dictatorships, monarchies or liberal democracies , united only around just one thing : the all out defence of well-off people's private property (and the nominal defence of the 'individual').

Once again doubletalk.

The defence of ill-gotten capital accumulation was sincere enough, but in practise most of the rewards and the protection of the law that was supposed to go to all individuals, instead went to native-born, educated, upper middle class, straight males of the dominant religious and ethnic group.

These nations might never declare formal military war against each other but they were always secretly at war against each other over matters of money.

In the form of nationalist trade wars, together with nationalist wars over intellectual property rights and nationalist wars over the flow of capital, labour and goods.

So once again, behind the smokescreen doubletalk of universal brotherhood of individual rights, nationalism trumps all.

One can only point to the immense secret efforts by both America and Britain, at the very depths of their Allied war against Hitler and Tojo, to beggar the other in postwar trade matters, to show how much greed is the real underlying ideology of many of our rulers.

And all three clusterings were united in giving unearned wealth to members of their privileged subgroups by taking from the weak.

The weak might be an internal group - their own majority ethnicity's poorest . Or it might be the more traditional form of imperialism - taking the natural resources and labour from ethnic and religious minorities inside the borders of their empire cum nation or from overseas 'colonies'.

So imperialism and nationalism actually united all three supposedly different ideological clusters.

But they then had to morally justify why it was so very morally wrong to steal private property of the strong but quite alright to steal the private and public property of the weak.

The traditional way was to claim that their nation-empire-civilization was the sole, best, bearer of the one true religion and that they weren't stealing at all - merely extracting a university tuition sized fee from the heathens in exchange for teaching them of this priceless boon.

But there were quite a number of one true and universal religions in the nineteenth century and this led to wars among them ---- as long as people still believed in religions.

But when people stopped believing that there was any real difference between Catholics and Protestants, indeed between Christians, Moslems and heathens, a new moral justification was required.

Now the true civilizations, those worthy enough to enslave other lesser beings and feel morally good about it, were the most scientific ones.

A peculiar form of science. mind you - one much beloved by Conservatives and Republicans of the day - because it said that Evolutionary success inevitably went to the big and ruthless over the small and weak.

Better science meant both better guns to put down the scientifically backward darkies and in feeling a warm moral glow while doing so.

Because if the darkies had fought back successfully, that would mean that they too are scientifically advanced and hence a worthy civilization, in evolutionary terms.

A clear example of this was how the West responded when Japan beat the Russians in the 1905 war.

But science is truly universal, at least in the big picture, so how then to justify why it was right for scientifically advanced England to invade backward China but not for scientifically advanced Japan to do the same ?

I have often thought the sudden rise of many new ideologies at the same time as the sudden rise of Scientism was somehow intimately connected.

I don't mean the people who founded these various -isms were insincere.

The Magnification of Small Differences

I just mean the success of these many brand new ideologies can be laid to the fact that they allowed 'moral' wars against each other among the world's powerful and ruthless, elites who were otherwise united in all worshipping at one new and universal religion - scientism and its offshoots : the new nationalism, the new imperialism, the new racism and the new social darwinism...

About Me

I write, urgently, about our world's painfully too-slow transition into a new era, the Age of Entanglement. Ironically - and typically - this supposed new era actually represents a modified return to the world's oldest philosophy.
For the ancients almost universally saw all life as thoroughly entangled, saw all lifeforms as dining together at a common table - open commensality on a global scale.
Today’s science demonstrates that for us to survive on Earth, humans must sustain the lifeforms that in turn sustain us . So, for example, for us to kill the ocean’s upper reaches will soon remove the very oxygen we need to live.
And economics confirms we can not afford to replace the tens of trillions of dollars of free goods that Nature effortlessly provides humanity annually : there is no “Mars Plan B”.